Posts Tagged ‘sketchbook’

Day 23 had a whole idea of it’s own. It wanted to be a character drawing and so that is what it became, at least in a very rough, draft, pencil form. It is something to be revisited later, however, either to work on here or recreate elsewhere outside of the challenge.

I wanted to see the difference that was achieved using inktense as regular colouring pencils compared to activating them with water. I drew the leaf and coloured it in with layers of colour all over, trying to keep each side to the leaf even. The right side was then activated and very loosely blended with water to compare the difference in the colours, intensity of the pigments and tonal qualities. Which side do you prefer? The softer, plain and textured left or the brighter, flatter and vibrant right?

Day 21 was a pastel, rainbow, inktense pencils day. My time for this one was limited and out of the house. Thankfully sitting in a warm coffee shop helped the back layer to dry out fairly quickly so that the circles could go on top.

After cleaning my desk area I found the purple and yellow Faber-Castel Gelatos and, along with a black biro, decided that they would do the job of today’s exploratory sketchbook page. I like it and I quite enjoy how the marks of where I scribble with the Gelatos stays behind underneath the pigment when I activate and gently blend it with water.

As boring as these colour swatch pages may seem for a sketchbook I really enjoy them as well as find them helpful. There is just something about seeing all of the colours lined up in some kind of order that I like and find very visually pleasing, I think particularly when my work is often more chaotic and less planned in nature and approach. This is the last one for now and shows my regular colouring pencils.

My second page of colour swatches was to see what my small set of inktense pencils came out like, I find it particularly hard to tell what the colours will look like with these thanks to the pencils being wrapped in a dark blue anyway, the colour ends to denote what the pencil is are much harder to see than my regular watercolours which have a natural light wood finish on the outside of the pencil itself. Below was a section where I had been cleaning my brush while activating both my watercolour pencils the day before and my inktense pencils that day.

I decided I wanted to work with my different coloured pencils, both water based and regular for a few upcoming works of art, however, I didn’t have a reliable set of colour swatches for them to get an idea of what I had available to me. Day 17 was about indexing my watercolour pencils and how the pigments reacted to water.